A PRESCRIPTION FROM DOCTOR DE SADE

 

Folly - 29,5 x 39,5 cm acryl on canvas - verkauft/sold

A PRESCRIPTION FROM DOCTOR DE SADE

                                                         Lust’s passion will be served; it demands,

                                                         it militates, it tyrannizes.

                                                                                               Marquis de Sade

Here, take fifty

of these and if you manage to wake up

don’t call me in the morning. Better still

I want you perched atop a column

crushed by sunlight in some stony waste of

Syria or Sinai, a martyr to your failure of nerve.

Pain and pleasure are but Siamese twins

who share a couch and a plate of pommes frites. Nevertheless

next time an opportunity comes knocking, invite it in, offer a brandy,

then sit back and see what tingles first.

Maybe not a moment of perfumed nights will follow, or the perfect spasm,

though plenty of delicious remorse—think of your wife, her evenings

spent knitting a hair shirt for your conscience— oh sweat-drenched   

insomniac—or your husband working overtime to buy you

that vacation in Mazatlan you’ve always wanted—and no regrets to speak of. 

In a Spanish Garden

 

Verregneter Sommer - Rainy Summer 50 x 60 cm acryl -verkauft/sold

SOME PLACES

Some places seem to have more beauty

than the natives know what to do with. So we

have come here to manage their surplus. But all I

can do is think about the past, a useless non-

beautiful activity, producing emotional re-runs

featuring Regret, Humiliation, Eternal Embarrassment.

I go on an uphill speed march through an olive grove

to sweat it all out, and test my muscles, breathe a little

and think about the lamb I’m going to have for dinner

at a restaurant with turn of the last century Majorcan

Art-Nouveau atmosphere, a fanciful, curvaceous staircase

of exquisitely carved woodwork and turquoise tiles on the walls.

And there’s an actual dumb waiter lifting delicious food  

from a subterranean kitchen. We are going to eat in the garden

amid moonlight, palm trees, Spanish architecture, the air warm

and sweet with jasmine and pines. Returning from my forced march

I find Karin working in the back yard that we are renting

along with a bungalow—formerly a storage shed for oranges  

and wine, where we sleep and watch soccer on television. She’s trimming

and primping the flowers, and before I go in she looks at me, squints

and says, “You look gruesome.” Something to think about in the shower. 

Round Top Festival Institute, Saturday June 9, 2012, Texas Festival Orchestra

So what?

 

Der Duft des Sommers - The Scent of Summer 3 x 10 x 10 cm - acryl/shellack ink on canvas - available!

AN UNATURAL HISTORY OF PROGRESS

There’s jazz in the courtyard, moonlight espresso, grandma

issuing dire warnings in archaic dialect, grandpa

sneaking off to the boiler room, to conspire with tobacco.

The streets are without porn.

Bump and grind if you can find it, yes, but no porn.

A manhole hissing fiercely nearby. Kids playing stickball, but gingerly,

for it is Sunday, and they are wearing their best.

Plague germinating on rotting hulks in Sythian ports,

sailing on to Naples and Palermo, devastating Rome,

depopulating Florence, shutting down theatres in London.

Peasant and lord scarfing raw garlic and, as if longing

for their bacterial beginnings, washing neither bodies nor garments,

a mad flurry of Ostrogoths or Visigoths

spilling over city walls, smashing monasteries, no one bathing

for hundreds of years, Donald Trump always

coming back to take more, castor oil, chemo therapy

which just kills you more slowly than cancer, it seems,

public executions family reunions Hitler and his Huns

Bush #2 and his version thereof, chronology a side issue at best—

   shit just keeps happening—

until: a shriveled, oily hot dog in a soft bun at Woolworth’s

on a Saturday afternoon, circa 1968, Concord, California

one hundred degrees outside, not much cooler inside,

the air salty and dark, an odor of rancid butter

coming from the pop corn maker, add to that a

purloined copy of “Ring” magazine,

George Chuvalo and Buster Mathis

pounding each other on its front cover,

snug and damp beneath t-shirt and jeans, and I feel

well-fed, with half my “dog” in hand, and as cunning as a gangster:

thus progress makes its belated appearance in human affairs.